I am one who steers very clear of tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. I often believe progressives plant stories in order to distract and disrupt, enabling them to pursue their true goals and objectives. That’s why I stress the importance of staying focused on the modern liberal socialist policies of the Obama administration, not the sideshow antics.

However, as a former combat commander, I have been trained to look for trends. And I believe we’ve found a very disturbing one. it seems that back door gun control is in full effect in the United States. Why? Thanks to Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we can no longer smelt lead from ore in the United States.

The first contact the EPA made with The Doe Run Lead Smelter in Herculaneum, Missouri (population 2,800) was in 2008 but it was in 2010 that the EPA finally forced Doe Run to plan a shut down. This plant has been in operation since 1892 but will finally close its doors this month. It was the last lead smelting plant in the US.

The closedown is due to new extremely tight air quality restrictions placed on this specific plant. President Obama and his EPA raised the regulations by 10 fold and it would have cost the plant $100 million to comply.

In response to the Doe Run lead smelter shutdown, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the Doe Run Company “made a business decision” to shut down the smelter instead of installing pollution control technologies needed to reduce sulfur dioxide and lead emissions as required by the Clean Air Act.

Of course this is why we need serious regulatory reform that precludes executive agency fiat, especially regulation implementation that exceeds a certain adverse financial impact to a private sector business.

Of course the canned progressive socialist response is “For years families with children near Doe Run’s facilities have been exposed to unacceptable levels of lead, one of the most dangerous neurotoxins in the environment,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Compliance and Enforcement Assurance. There are a few auxiliary lead processing plants remaining in the USA but their function is to re-claim lead from old batteries.

What this all means is that after December 2013, any ammunition that will be available to US citizens will have to be imported, which will surely increase the price and possibly come under government control. It seems this is fully in concert with the US Military and Homeland Defense recent purchase of large quantities of ammunition.

The effect is chilling: you can own all the guns you want, but if you can’t get ammo, you are out of luck. Remember when President Obama promised his minions that he was working on gun control behind the scenes? Welcome to it. The result is that all domestically mined lead ore will have to be shipped overseas, refined and then shipped back to the US.

Not only will ammo be even harder to come by, the demand and the process of supply will cause the price to skyrocket even more. And ponder this, there is an excellent chance that Obama will rig the market to where all ammo has to be purchased from the government instituting an ammo registration.

There hasn’t been a peep about this in the major news outlets, but it’s done. With the US no longer producing lead, all supplies will now have to come from China, Australia or Peru, with the overwhelming emphasis on China.

China is the largest miner of lead and the largest importer of scrap lead in the world. The highly progressive state of California recently passed a law that lead ammo is banned for sporting use. There is an alternative, copper ammo, but it is hugely expensive to make, and pure copper bullets are frequently labeled ‘cop killers’ so they can’t be sold.

So America, back door gun control is moving forward and while we are all distracted with Obamacare and Iran nuclear negotiations, our Second Amendment rights are undergoing an assault by clandestine infiltration. Remember we reported on this website the gun registration actions being undertaken in Washington DC. Barack Obama and his progressive socialist acolytes are quite savvy at political chess. He is seeking to outflank, envelope, and destroy the Second Amendment. Now it’s our move in 2014.

WASHINGTON—The House on Tuesday passed legislation extending a ban on guns that can't be spotted by a metal detector, but held back from expanding it to address all-plastic guns made possible by 3-D printer technology.

The bill, passed on a voice vote, would extend for 10 years a law dating back to 1988 that makes it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess a gun that could elude metal detectors, which are used for security screening at government buildings, schools and airports. Under the law, gun makers must include a certain amount of metal, even if it is unnecessary for operating the weapon and can be removed.

To prevent the law from lapsing, the Senate must also pass an extension before it expires at midnight Monday. The chamber returns from a Thanksgiving holiday break next week.

Senate Democrats, worried about 3-D printers' ability to produce plastic guns, are hoping to beef up the current law.

Last year, a firearms dealer posted online instructions for how to use a 3-D printer to make a plastic gun with a metal component that can be easily removed, a manufacturing process that is allowed under the current law. Some Democrats, including Rep. Steve Israel (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), want to tighten the law to require plastic guns have metal parts that can't be removed, so metal detectors could still spot such weapons.

When the law was introduced in the 1980s, that notion was "a matter of science fiction. The problem is that today it is a reality," Mr. Israel said on the House floor Tuesday. He introduced legislation requiring firearms to have two or three pieces of metal that can't be removed, depending on the type of weapon, but House GOP leaders haven't announced plans to consider it.

In the Senate, Mr. Schumer said he would press to quickly pass legislation requiring firearms to include at least one irremovable metal component. But if his bill doesn't secure the support of all 100 senators, he said the Senate would try to pass the House's 10-year extension.

It is unclear how much opposition the tougher bills would face within each chamber. The National Shooting Sports Foundation Inc., a trade association for the firearms industry, supports extending the current law, but has signaled resistance to changes that could make it difficult for manufacturers to create prototypes or conduct other research with new technology, including 3-D printers.

"We are always concerned that laws and regulations do not hamper the ability of our members to take advantage of technological advancements," Larry Keane, the group's senior vice president, wrote in a Nov. 19 letter to House leaders.

The National Rifle Association's lobbying arm also said it opposed any changes to the law. "We will continue to aggressively fight any expansion of the [bill] or any other proposal that would infringe on our Second Amendment rights," it said in a statement Tuesday.

To date, there are no known instances of a person being shot with a plastic gun in the U.S., according to officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Advocates of tightening the legislation said it was designed to be updated regularly to respond to changes in technology. "We're not just talking about what the threat is right this second, but what the threat would look like after 10 years," said Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, director of social policy and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

Here are three of the most relevant active cases involving the Second Amendment, ones that promise to expand Second Amendment liberty, and resolve some of the core issues left unresolved by Heller and McDonald. Two of them will likely be considered for certiorari by the Supreme Court (though whether they will take them up is always hard to predict).

CRS: More Guns, Less CrimeA new report from the Congressional Research Service affirms a point 2nd Amendment advocates have long argued: Despite the massive growth in the number of firearms obtained by Americans through the decades, the homicide rate has fallen dramatically -- more than 50% since 1993. Breitbart's AWR Hawkins gives the breakdown: "According to the report, the 'firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide' rate was 6.6 per 100,000 Americans in 1993. Following the exponential growth in the number of guns, that rate fell to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2000. This rate rose from 2004 to 2005 and got as high as 3.9 in 2006 and 2007, but it then resumed falling in 2008... This figure fell to 3.2 per 100,000 by 2011." Given the Left's rhetoric, you'd think the homicide rate has never been higher. Far from it.

He shuffles the magazines, which look identical, and then challenges the audience to tell the difference.

“How is a deputy or an officer supposed to know which is which?” he asks.

Colorado’s package of gun laws, enacted this year after mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., has been hailed as a victory by advocates of gun control. But if Sheriff Cooke and a majority of the other county sheriffs in Colorado offer any indication, the new laws — which mandate background checks for private gun transfers and outlaw magazines over 15 rounds — may prove nearly irrelevant across much of the state’s rural regions.

Some sheriffs, like Sheriff Cooke, are refusing to enforce the laws, saying that they are too vague and violate Second Amendment rights. Many more say that enforcement will be “a very low priority,” as several sheriffs put it. All but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado signed on in May to a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes.

The resistance of sheriffs in Colorado is playing out in other states, raising questions about whether tougher rules passed since Newtown will have a muted effect in parts of the American heartland, where gun ownership is common and grass-roots opposition to tighter restrictions is high.

In New York State, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed one of the toughest gun law packages in the nation last January, two sheriffs have said publicly they would not enforce the laws — inaction that Mr. Cuomo said would set “a dangerous and frightening precedent.” The sheriffs’ refusal is unlikely to have much effect in the state: According to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, since 2010 sheriffs have filed less than 2 percent of the two most common felony gun charges. The vast majority of charges are filed by the state or local police.

In Liberty County, Fla., a jury in October acquitted a sheriff who had been suspended and charged with misconduct after he released a man arrested by a deputy on charges of carrying a concealed firearm. The sheriff, who was immediately reinstated by the governor, said he was protecting the man’s Second Amendment rights. And in California, a delegation of sheriffs met with Gov. Jerry Brown this fall to try to persuade him to veto gun bills passed by the Legislature, including measures banning semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines and lead ammunition for hunting (Mr. Brown signed the ammunition bill but vetoed the bill outlawing the rifles).

“Our way of life means nothing to these politicians, and our interests are not being promoted in the legislative halls of Sacramento or Washington, D.C.,” said Jon E. Lopey, the sheriff of Siskiyou County, Calif., one of those who met with Governor Brown. He said enforcing gun laws was not a priority for him, and he added that residents of his rural region near the Oregon border are equally frustrated by regulations imposed by the federal Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency.

This year, the new gun laws in Colorado have become political flash points. Two state senators who supported the legislation were recalled in elections in September; a third resigned last month rather than face a recall. Efforts to repeal the statutes are already in the works.

Countering the elected sheriffs are some police chiefs, especially in urban areas, and state officials who say that the laws are not only enforceable but that they are already having an effect. Most gun stores have stopped selling the high-capacity magazines for personal use, although one sheriff acknowledged that some stores continued to sell them illegally. Some people who are selling or otherwise transferring guns privately are seeking background checks.

Eric Brown, a spokesman for Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, said, “Particularly on background checks, the numbers show the law is working.” The Colorado Bureau of Investigation has run 3,445 checks on private sales since the law went into effect, he said, and has denied gun sales to 70 people.

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A Federal District Court judge last month ruled against a claim in the sheriffs’ lawsuit that one part of the magazine law was unconstitutionally vague. The judge also ruled that while the sheriffs could sue as individuals, they had no standing to sue in their official capacity.

Still, the state’s top law enforcement officials acknowledged that sheriffs had wide discretion in enforcing state laws.

“We’re not in the position of telling sheriffs and chiefs what to do or not to do,” said Lance Clem, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety. “We have people calling us all the time, thinking they’ve got an issue with their sheriff, and we tell them we don’t have the authority to intervene.”

Sheriffs who refuse to enforce gun laws around the country are in the minority, though no statistics exist. In Colorado, though, sheriffs like Joe Pelle of Boulder County, who support the laws and have more liberal constituencies that back them, are outnumbered.

“A lot of sheriffs are claiming the Constitution, saying that they’re not going to enforce this because they personally believe it violates the Second Amendment,” Sheriff Pelle said. “But that stance in and of itself violates the Constitution.”

Even Sheriff W. Pete Palmer of Chaffee County, one of the seven sheriffs who declined to join the federal lawsuit because he felt duty-bound to carry out the laws, said he was unlikely to aggressively enforce them. He said enforcement poses “huge practical difficulties,” and besides, he has neither the resources nor the pressure from his constituents to make active enforcement a high priority. Violations of the laws are misdemeanors.

“All law enforcement agencies consider the community standards — what is it that our community wishes us to focus on — and I can tell you our community is not worried one whit about background checks or high-capacity magazines,” he said.

At their extreme, the views of sheriffs who refuse to enforce gun laws echo the stand of Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and the author of “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope.” Mr. Mack has argued that county sheriffs are the ultimate arbiters of what is constitutional and what is not. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, founded by Mr. Mack, is an organization of sheriffs and other officers who support his views.

“The Supreme Court does not run my office,” Mr. Mack said in an interview. “Just because they allow something doesn’t mean that a good constitutional sheriff is going to do it.” He said that 250 sheriffs from around the country attended the association’s recent convention.

Matthew J. Parlow, a law professor at Marquette University, said that some states, including New York, had laws that allowed the governor in some circumstances to investigate and remove public officials who engaged in egregious misconduct — laws that in theory might allow the removal of sheriffs who failed to enforce state statutes. But, he said, many governors could be reluctant to use such powers. And in most cases, any penalty for a sheriff who chose not to enforce state law would have to come from voters.

Sheriff Cooke, for his part, said that he was entitled to use discretion in enforcement, especially when he believed the laws were wrong or unenforceable.

“In my oath it says I’ll uphold the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of the State of Colorado,” he said, as he posed for campaign photos in his office — he is running for the State Senate in 2014. “It doesn’t say I have to uphold every law passed by the Legislature.

CO School Shooting ReviewThe student who shoot and wounded two in a Colorado high school before killing himself did so with a legally purchased shotgun, not an "assault weapon," and he had no criminal background. (Joe Biden has been known to recommend shotguns from time to time.) There are already calls to "do something" again about "gun violence," especially since we just observed the one year anniversary of Sandy Hook, but as National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke writes, "Everything that the shooter did ... was already illegal. He walked into a school with a firearm. That's illegal. He shot at people with intent to kill and maim. That's illegal. He attempted to commit premeditated murder. That's illegal." Two final notes: 1) He was stopped by an armed resource officer at the school, and 2) this was no Tea Party crazy; one fellow student described the perp as "very proud of being a socialist."

Dear Marc F.,On Friday, Congress sent a $1.1 trillion government funding bill to the President, who promptly signed the legislation into law.

Like every "omnibus," the bill has a number of gun-related provisions -- some pro-gun, some anti-gun. And we suspect that a majority of our members will probably oppose this bloated monstrosity.

That being said, there were some key victories in this bill. So briefly, here are the pros and cons.

THE PROS

THE "OMNIBUS" KILLS THE ARMS TRADE TREATY. In the 113th Congress, we believe we have about twenty votes more than we need to stop ratification of the UN Arms Trade Treaty. This is extremely important because, if implemented, this treaty -- signed by the Obama administration -- could, without further legislation, result in massive semi-auto and handgun bans, magazine bans, gun registration, and microstamping.

Even though we felt comfortable that we could stop the treaty's ratification, we were concerned that Obama would attempt to implement it by administrative fiat. For this reason, we drafted language defunding its implementation. With your help, we have spent the last year pushing incessantly for the adoption of this amendment defunding the ATT.

That language is contained on the "Omnibus." For many of our members, killing the ATT is more important than any other issue.

IT CUTS A LITTLE OBAMACARE MONEY. This is a good thing, since the anti-gun ObamaCare mandate threatens to centralize our medical data, thus resulting in gun bans for millions of people (similar to what’s already been done to more than 150,000 military veterans). While some cuts are certainly welcome, by and large, we are relying on our amendments to bills like the unemployment bill to put a stake through the heart of ObamaCare.

IT CONTAINS A HOST OF (GENERALLY BOILERPLATE) PROVISIONS DEFUNDING OBAMA'S ANTI-GUN ACTIONS. These include a repudiation of the shotgun import ban, other import bans, and changes in various definitions (such as "curios and relics") which have been eyed by the ATF.

It outlaws programs like Fast & Furious and requires the Congress to report on alleged efforts by our federal government to buy up ammunition.

Finally, while it does contain more money for the Center for Disease Control's violent crime studies, it continues to prohibit this federal health research money from being used to advocate gun control.

THE CONS

FUNDING FOR ANTI-GUN AGENCIES. The bill contains increased money for a number of programs we don't like, including:

* $60 million more for NICS (although we succeeded, last year, in preventing the FBI from using NICS to screen every gun purchase in the country);* $58.5 million for states to submit NICS records;* $70 million more for the ATF.

CONTINUATION OF ANTI-GUN BOILERPLATE. The bill continues anti-gun boilerplate such as the Senator Schumer amendment defunding the McClure-Volkmer disabilities relief program. This means that thousands upon thousands of Americans who are disqualified from owning firearms because of non-violent federal felonies have no way to get their gun rights back.

REFUSAL TO STICK IN SOME PROVISIONS WE WERE FIGHTING FOR. We would have liked to see language defunding HHS's new regulations that repeal the HIPAA privacy laws that protect gun owners. This Executive Action means that tens of millions of Americans could lose their gun rights without a court order.We also would have liked to see a provision defunding the ATF’s efforts to register multiple handgun purchases in the Southwest.

The HIPAA issue is fairly new, and we will continue to fight for these on the regular appropriations bills when they begin to move in May.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Gun control fanatic Michael Bloomberg is trying to do a "victory lap" on the "Omnibus." In the narratives we have seen, Bloomberg carefully ignores the provisions of the bill which go against him, particularly the provision killing the ATT.

This is certainly a desperate effort by a defeated man to appear "relevant," rather than a legitimate assessment of who won or who lost.

The propagandists over at ABC are out with a new investigative report on the dangers of firearms inside the home: "7,391 children [are] rushed to the hospital every year with ... gun injuries," mused anchor Diane Sawyer, citing a new study from the journal Pediatrics, and "453 of those children die at the hospital." As usual, however, the report leaves out some important disclaimers: The study's definition of "children" includes anyone under the age of 20. Apparently when it comes to exploiting the dangers of gun ownership, you're considered a child halfway through college. (Yet those in puberty are considered "adult" enough to make coherent decisions regarding sex, birth control and sexual orientation?) Secondly, Sawyer failed to mention that 2,149 of the incidents were from accidental or negligent discharges, 270 were attempted suicides, and the remaining 4,559 were criminal assaults (gangs, anyone?). Talk about a gross distortion of the facts

I disrespect infowars as a source, but this matter of these massive purchases of ammo are really getting to me. The fg POST OFFICE?!? Hard to not conclude that there is a mass governmental conspiracy going on

I disrespect infowars as a source, but this matter of these massive purchases of ammo are really getting to me. The fg POST OFFICE?!? Hard to not conclude that there is a mass governmental conspiracy going on

The USPS actually has3 law enforcement entities under it's umbrella They are the Postal Inspection Service the Inspector General and the Postal Police that actually provide uniformed police services at certain postal facilities.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass, the Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews on Nov. 9-10, 1938. Historians have documented most everything about it except what made it so easy to attack the defenseless Jews without fear of resistance. Their guns were registered and thus easily confiscated.

To illustrate, turn the clock back further and focus on just one victim, a renowned German athlete. Alfred Flatow won first place in gymnastics at the 1896 Olympics. In 1932, he dutifully registered three handguns, as required by a decree of the liberal Weimar Republic. The decree also provided that in times of unrest, the guns could be confiscated. The government gullibly neglected to consider that only law-abiding citizens would register, while political extremists and criminals would not. However, it did warn that the gun-registration records must be carefully stored so they would not fall into the hands of extremists.

The ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power just a year later, in 1933. The Nazis immediately used the firearms-registration records to identify, disarm and attack “enemies of the state,” a euphemism for Social Democrats and other political opponents of all types. Police conducted search-and-seizure operations for guns and “subversive” literature in Jewish communities and working-class neighborhoods.

Jews were increasingly deprived of more and more rights of citizenship in the coming years. The Gestapo cautioned the police that it would endanger public safety to issue gun permits to Jews. Hitler faked a show of tolerance for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but Flatow refused to attend the reunion there of former champions. He was Jewish and would not endorse the farce.

By fall of 1938, the Nazis were ratcheting up measures to expropriate the assets of Jews. To ensure that they had no means of resistance, the Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms.

Flatow walked into a Berlin police station to comply with the command and was arrested on the spot, as were other Jews standing in line. The arrest report confirmed that his pistols were duly registered, which was obviously how the police knew he had them. While no law prohibited a Jew from owning guns, the report recited the Nazi mantra: “Jews in possession of weapons are a danger to the German people.” Despite his compliance, Flatow was turned over to the Gestapo.

This scenario took place all over Germany — firearms were confiscated from all Jews registered as gun owners. As this was occurring, a wholly irrelevant event provided just the excuse needed to launch a violent attack on the Jewish community: A Polish teenager who was Jewish shot a German diplomat in Paris. The stage was set to instigate Kristallnacht, a carefully orchestrated Nazi onslaught against the entire Jewish community in Germany that horrified the world and even the German public.

Under the pretense of searching for weapons, Jewish homes were vandalized, businesses ransacked and synagogues burned. Jews were terrorized, beaten and killed. Orders were sent to shoot anyone who resisted.

SS head Heinrich Himmler decreed that possession of a gun by a Jew was punishable by 20 years in a concentration camp. An estimated 20,000 Jewish men were thrown into such camps for this reason or just for being Jewish. The Jewish community was then held at ransom to pay for the damage done by the Nazis.

These horrific events were widely reported in the American media, such as The New York Times. After Hitler launched World War II, the United States made preparations in case it was dragged into the conflict. Just before the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress passed a law noting the Gestapo methods and declaring that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms may not be infringed by such measures as registration of firearms.

Kristallnacht has been called “the day the Holocaust began.” Flatow’s footsteps can be followed to see why. He would be required to wear the Star of David. In 1942, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he starved to death.

One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Flatow in his last days. Perhaps memories of the Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts about whether he should have registered his guns in 1932? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered his firearms at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? Did he fantasize about shooting Nazis? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets over his act of compliance.

Today, gun control, registration and prohibition are depicted as benign and progressive. Government should register gun owners and ban any guns it wishes, Americans are told, because government is inherently good and trustworthy. The experiences of Hitler’s Germany and, for that matter, Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, are beneath the realm of possibility in exceptional America. Let’s hope so.

Still, be careful what you wish for.

Stephen Halbrook is research fellow with the Independent Institute and author “Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State’” (Independent Institute, 2013).

• Organizations Ohio National Guard 52nd Civil Support TeamOhio National Guard 52nd Civil Support Team Documents from an Ohio National Guard (ONG) training drill conducted last January reveal the details of a mock disaster where Second Amendment supporters with “anti-government” opinions were portrayed as domestic terrorists.

20130502_OHIONATIONALGUARD_52CSTThe Ohio National Guard’s Civil Support Team practices in a May 2013 drill at Put-in-Bay

The ONG 52nd Civil Support Team training scenario involved a plot from local school district employees to use biological weapons in order to advance their beliefs about “protecting Gun Rights and Second Amendment rights.”

Portsmouth Chief of Police Bill Raisin told NBC 3 WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia that the drill accurately represented “the reality of the world we live in,” adding that such training “helps us all be prepared.”

Internal ONG documents provided to Media Trackers after repeated delays provide further context to what WSAZ-TV reported last winter.

In the disaster-preparedness scenario, two Portsmouth Junior High School employees poisoned school lunches with mustard gas, acting on orders from white-nationalist leader William Pierce.

The ONG team discovered biological weapons being produced in the school, requiring activation of containment and decontamination procedures.

Participants in the disaster drill located documents expressing the school employees’ “anti-government” sentiments, as well as a note identifying Pierce as the fictional right-wing terrorists’ leader.

ONG’s 52nd Civil Support Unit participated in a similar drill involving left-wing terrorists with Athens County first responders last year; public officials apologized for that training the next day in response to complaints from local environmentalist groups.

No apology to Ohioans who support limited government and the Second Amendment appears to be forthcoming.

Scioto County Emergency Management Agency director Kim Carver refused to comment, telling Media Trackers she was “not going to get into an Ohio Army National Guard issue that you have with them.”

Ohio National Guard Communications Director James Sims II suggested Media Trackers was “inferring” from the ONG document’s contents as opposed to “what’s actually in the report.”

After excerpts of the report were read to him, Sims said it was “not relevant” to understand why conservatives may feel unduly targeted by ONG’s training scenario.

Buckeye Firearms Association spokesman Chad Baus told Media Trackers that “it is a scary day indeed when law enforcement are being trained that Second Amendment advocates are the enemy,”

“The revelation of this information is appalling to me, and to all citizens of Ohio who are true conservatives and patriots, who don’t have guns for any other reason than that the Second Amendment gives them that right,” Portage County TEA Party Executive Director Tom Zawistowski said in a separate Media Trackers interview.

Media Trackers reached out to Portsmouth-area state legislators Representative Terry Johnson and Senator Joe Uecker for comment about the drill, which took place within their respective districts. Neither replied to phone calls or emails in time for publication.

ONG’s January 2013 training exercise is one of many instances where government officials have identified those with limited-government or pro-Second Amendment opinions as potential terror threats.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement agencies that a predicted rise in“right-wing extremism” would be fueled by “proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans” and “the election of the first African American president.”

Throughout modern history, groups and individuals associated with left-wing causes have proven far more likely to commit acts of domestic terror.

In 2012, members of the anarcho-socialist Occupy Cleveland movement were arrested and prosecuted for attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge with explosives, to commemorate International Workers’ Day.

Last year, leftist groups Earth First and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) claimed responsibility for the sabotage and property destruction of businesses in Washington and Van Wert counties.

A new FBI report says that violent crime continues to fall nationwide, which might annoy liberals because gun purchases continue to rise.

In the first six months of 2013, murders fell by nearly 7 percent, compared with the same period in 2012. Aggravated assaults fell by 6.6 percent, and robberies are down 1.8 percent. "All of the offenses in the violent crime category—murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery—showed decreases when data from the first six months of 2013 were compared with data from the first six months of 2012," according to the FBI. Overall, violent crime in the U.S. fell by 5.4 percent. Burglaries, larceny and auto thefts also decreased.

The left likes to link violent crime to the proliferation of guns in the country, so it's worth noting that the crime reductions described in the FBI report correlate with a steady increase in firearm sales. "Gun records checks, fueled by a post-Newtown boom of gun sales, hit a new high in 2013, and industry analysts expect ammunition to be the big seller this year as consumers catch up to all of those firearms purchases," reported the Washington Times last month. "More than 21 million applications were run through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System last year, marking nearly an 8 percent increase and the 11th straight year that the number has risen."

It's also worth noting that gun-ownership rates in the Midwest (39 percent) and South (50 percent) far exceed gun-ownership rates in the Northeast (22 percent), yet violent crime is down more in the Midwest and South than it is in the Northeast, according to the FBI statistics. And rural areas, where gun-ownership rates also are higher than average, saw a larger reduction in violent crime that metropolitan areas, where gun-ownership rates are lower than average.

Not that gun-control zealots, who are so certain of a causal link between firearms and violent crime rates, care about such details.

Of course. The money is cyber crime. A lot less risk. Almost zero chance of getting caught and far less consequences even in the very rare case anyone does get caught.

Some criminals are far smarter than law enforcement. OTOH, I do recognize that law enforcement hands are often tied and the same laws that protect us from law enforcement abuse also protect the crooks.

And it only takes a few corrupt law enforcement officials to ruin the ability of those who are with integrity to be successful.

A new report released by Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun groups Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in American (MDA) and Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) claims that, "In the fourteen months since the mass shooting in Newtown, CT, there have been at least 44 school shootings including fatal and nonfatal assaults, suicides, and unintentional shootings -- an average of more than three a month. These school shootings resulted in 28 deaths and 37 non-fatal gunshot injuries." This data however is highly misleading. "Included in the numbers are [11] suicides," explains columnist John Lott. "Also included are late night shootings in school parking lots, on other school grounds or even off school property, often involving gangs. As 'shootings,' they also include any incident where shots were fired, even when nobody was injured." They also fail to mention that the overall number of school shootings continues to decrease.

After the Connecticut legislature reacted to Sandy Hook by criminalizing scaryfirearms, thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of gun owners have refusedto register their firearms (http://patriotpost.us/posts/23380) with the state,while the state isn't yet doing much about it. Connecticut Carry, a pro-gungroup, called the legislature's bluff, issuing a press release(http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/372426/second-amendment-group-connecticut-put-or-shut-charles-c-w-cooke)demanding that the state "enforce the tyranny they passed or repeal itentirely." The group calls the laws "foolishly conceived," "insufferable" and"an affront to every law-abiding citizen." Furthermore, "Every official whosupports such legal foolishness mocks our State and the Constitution theyswore to uphold." Just so, and this may mean that things are about to getinteresting in Connecticut.